Its the final morning of the Championship and the event has been anything but predictable. Day 1 was spent on the beach (well for most of us) - some went out for 5 minutes and came back on shore - that was the day's wind used up.

Worsty's day 1 started with a speeding ticket doing a 97 on a 60 zone, came out of the gates too early and started on the bar @11am - I think he had inside information that there was not going to be any more wind for the day. Unfortunately for Locke, Worsty was the only one that knew where their accommodation was and had great difficulty finding it from the hours between 11 to 2:30am. 4 taxi's later, they found "home".

Day 2 - well what a complete contrast to day one! Wind picked up building through out the day and by the afternoon it was blowing 25knots gusting to 30knots, steep waves hence the number of DNFs and DNSs. Fortunately no major accidents, the lead changed a few times showing the diversity in the skills of the fleet.

Must log off and rig up - 4 races to complete today before 2pm and there's wind but boy is it cold - 22˚C!

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

from gusting 20knots in the morning to 2 knots in the afternoon, we were only able to do one more race before calling it a day. here is the final result for day 1...........one day down, two more to go!

After 3 days of training, the Fiji Hobie Youth Championship started with ideal sailing conditions. 12 - 15 knots gusting up to 20 knots.

All competitors for the event (3 Wallis + Futuna, 1 Noumea and 8 Fiji Team) are failry evenly matched in skills and it's a battle to keep the lead especially between Chatonnier Lucas of New Caledonia and Moape Draunavesi of Fiji.

The occasional 20knots saw a couple of capsizes and remarkable recovering from the Wallis team who were heros from zeros.

Here are the results from the first 3 races this morning. They've just come in for lunch and then it's back on the water for another 3 races before calling it a day for Day 1.

Monday, June 20, 2011

My name is Deborah Sue and I took part in the Intro to Hobie Sailing Course organised by Fleet 252 held over the weekend of 28-29th May, 2011 in Laucala Bay. The main objective of the weekend was to have fun learning to sail Hobie Cats in a safe environment.

So! After a Friday evening 'classroom session' getting a preview of the hobie lifestyle and diagrammatic no sail zone, upwind, downwind and all the points in between; we started Saturday morning with learning the parts of the boat and rigging on land before launching off onto the water. Clear sunny skies and a nice gentle breeze of about 10-15 knots was perfect for us beginners and particularly those who'd never skippered before! Moape of the Youth Hobie Team was our instructor for the day and a very knowledgeable teacher for Cameron and me. After many practice tacks and gybes we all eventually got to the sandbank for lunch and a demonstration on Fiji's secret method of easily fixing stuck rudder cams. The wind picked up towards the end of the afternoon much to the thrill of some, and one team in discovering the love for speed on the water got a head-start on the following day's lesson on recovery of a capsized boat!!

All in all, it was a fantastic day out ... although a bit tiring as most disappeared soon after chowing down the yummy BBQ organised by Stephen and gang.

Sunday turned out to be surprisingly sunny (given all the rain Suva usually gets!) and after another class session with the blackboard, it was time to hit the water. At least half of us had harnesses this time and discovered the exhilaration of hiking out on the trapeze ... however, the promising strong winds of the early morning eased much and resulted in many a dunking! Oh, what FUN!! Capsize recovery was the lesson for the afternoon and our monkey-agile instructor (Cyril) much enjoyed climbing around on the boat as well as us to demonstrate the techniques.

The Course concluded on Monday evening at the Royal Suva Yacht Club with a last lecture from Lead Instructor Paul Littlefair, on basic meteorology to give us an idea of how local and global weather patterns come about, and how to interpret weather charts.